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This chapter characterizes the hominoid-producing localities and biostratigraphy in Yunnan Province, China. Yunnan Province is located in the southwestern part of China, on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau. A large number of fault depression basins are sprinkled among various mountain ridges of the plateau. The Neogene hominoid-bearing strata are exposed in such basins as at Kaiyuan, Lufeng, Yuanmou, and Baoshan Counties. Three hominoid localities in Yunnan are characterized by the presence of the hominoid genus Lufengpithecus, represented by three different species: L. keiyuanensis, L. lufengensis, and L. hudienensis. Their associated faunas also show some similarities as well as differences. Kaiyuan hominoid fauna is mostly uncovered from the middle and upper Xiaolongtan Formation, which is mostly lignite. The distribution of the fossils is very scattered, and the fossils are difficult to find. The chronological range of Lufeng hominoids is not large.

This book examines how environmental winds gained force and shaped Yunnan Province’s social landscapes. It looks at the lives of those individuals who not only encountered environmentalism but brought it into being in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). By focusing on the PRC’s environmental politics, it offers a different way of thinking about globalization, and in particular globalized formations. Drawing on the author’s extensive and ongoing engagements with many people in Yunnan Province, the book highlights the role played by ordinary people in what it calls “making the global.” It first provides an overview of wildlands and wildlife in the PRC before the environmental winds (1950s–1980s) and goes on to discuss some of the dominant theories for understanding globalization and globalized formations. It also considers how the Chinese metaphor of winds can be adopted as a concept for understanding how globalized social formations—in this case environmentalism—work.

This chapter examines how the border conflicts affected the social and economic development of two border provinces, Guangxi and Yunnan, and how the People's Liberation Army (PLA) used the conflicts to stimulate military modernization and to rebuild its reputation. It also discusses how Chinese media, including literature, movies, and music, covered the conflict and how these cultural artifacts of war influenced Chinese society in the 1980s. The border war with Vietnam forced Guangxi and especially Yunnan Provinces to commit enormous human and material resources to support military operations. Although the reasons for the region's backwardness were multifaceted, the border conflict certainly took a huge toll on its economic and social development. Socially and culturally, the war with Vietnam generated literature, songs, and motion pictures that extolled PLA soldiers who had sacrificed themselves.

This chapter discusses the first series of transnational nature conservation efforts that were launched in Yunnan Province in the 1980s, focusing on the role of various individuals such as World Wildlife Fund (WWF) staff, Chinese experts and scientists, and state officials. It argues that Yunnan did not become part of the global circuits of conservation interest and capital merely because of natural endowments or as a result of Western agency. Instead, it shows that a small but dedicated group of Chinese intellectuals and in-country staff from WWF undertook what it calls “transnational work.” It suggests that these made-in-China efforts were part of the structures by which global environmental winds were harnessed, gathered, and transformed—a level of engagement that is absent in most models of globalization.

This chapter examines how globalized formations of indigeneity were shaped and made in relation to environmental winds in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It begins with an overview of the ethnography of an indigenous space, paying attention to how nature conservation efforts in the PRC opened up space for the emergence of indigeneity. It then discusses official and popular conceptions of ethnicity in the PRC, along with the articulation of environmentalism in the creation of an indigenous space in Yunnan Province by Chinese experts and scientists. Focusing on the controversy in Yunnan over the issue of “sacred lands,” the chapter explains how Yunnanese scientists started to argue for sacred lands and indigenous knowledge and eventually expanded these arguments to foster a broader sense of environmental justice for all (rural) people.

This book examines the lives of scientists, rural villagers, state officials, and expatriate conservationists who were caught up in the so-called environmental winds in Southwest China. The metaphor of “environmental winds” (huanjing feng) is used by some Chinese scientists to describe changes associated with environmentalism. This book draws on the insights of the author, whose trip to Yunnan Province in 1995 exposed him to the world of environmentalism in the People’s Republic of China. This book considers how Chinese experts and scientists helped transform Yunnan Province into one of China’s most important places in the global environmental ecumene. Contrary to many scholarly and popular accounts that portray globalization as flowing across the world like a food, submerging local differences under a universal force (of Westernization or capitalism), it argues that there is no singular form of globalization that affects all places equally. What is often understood as “the global” is both quickly changing and highly diverse, with multiple globalizing logics, aims, and aspirations.

This chapter examines the social organization of street-level heroin distribution in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. The focus is on Kunming not only because it is the heroin capital of China, but also because the research project was conducted with the participation of researchers from a police college located there. Based on in-depth interviews with 39 heroin retailers in Kunming, the chapter explores the individual characteristics of street-level heroin dealers, the reasons for their engagement in heroin retail, and the modus operandi of street-level heroin distribution in Kunming. It also discusses maima (literally “selling horses” or snitching)—the most prevalent method used by drug enforcers to go after heroin retailers, and what these retailers usually do to protect themselves from being arrested by the authorities.

This chapter focuses on two rituals, each unique to a specific locale (Taidong and Dali) and both characterized by dramatic public displays of male bravado. Both the ritual of Blasting Handan Ye (Taidong) and the Torch Festival (Dali) feature the controlled but inherently and conspicuously dangerous exposure of (male) bodies to fire and incendiary explosives (that is, firecrackers). Participants risk injury and even death, ostensibly for the sake of communal fertility, but also in pursuit of individual affirmation as a particular kind of vigorous, aggressively masculine man. It is argued that the defiant, violent, even rebellious style of macho aggressivity displayed by the risk takers is instrumental to the community-affirming outcome of the ritual through the implied link between aggressive masculinity and male sexual prowess that is ritually shared across the group through the public “sacrifice” of the actors. The chapter also describes how both rituals have served as sites of political conflict: both were suppressed by the authorities in the late twentieth century, reemerging briefly as expressions of autonomous local identity in the late 1980s, only to be quickly coopted by the vicissitudes of globalization and economic development (specifically tourism) since the early 1990s.

This chapter reviews the history of the human disease popularly known as plague, which has caused three major pandemics in the past two millennia, focusing on the most recent pandemic and the discovery of the insect that transmitted the disease. It begins with the Third Pandemic started in 1855, which began in Yunnan Province in southwestern China, an area rich in geological and biological diversity. Infections increased as the disease slowly spread to Hong Kong, where it reached epidemic levels in 1894. From there, maritime trade on steamships carried the plague to India, Australia, and then worldwide, to Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The chapter describes how, while the pandemic raged, scientists investigated the cause of the disease, learning that bacteria carried by Oriental rat fleas and rats were responsible. This pandemic killed at least 15 million people, mostly in India, and continued for nearly a century.

Chapter 6 examines how amchi interact with conservation-development practitioners, policies, and projects. The chapter draws on fieldwork from Yunnan Province, China—a region actually called “Shangri-La”—as well as ethnography from Nepal and Bhutan. Perhaps surprisingly, insights about the nature of health and illness, the social lives of medicines, and the political-economic possibilities and constraints for meeting global health needs rarely intersect with insights gleaned from political ecology. Much of what exists in both academic and popular literature tends to focus on the interface between ethnobotany and biomedicine, specifically around bioprospecting or biopiracy: namely, the search for “magic bullet” plants and the well-founded fears that indigenous knowledge will be appropriated and commodified without sufficient forethought or compensation. Some work has focused on the ways plant knowledge is also social knowledge—the sense that herbal remedies are biocultural phenomena whose meanings and value are at once medical and social. Other points of convergence have occurred around issues of environmental health and the bio-psycho-social effects of conservation-induced displacement, natural disasters, or otherwise environmentally prompted migrations on local populations. This chapter links medical anthropology and political ecology by examining connections between the commodification of nature and culture in the context of amchi involvement with conservation-development projects, and how this relates to their role as healthcare providers and transmitters of Tibetan medical knowledge.

The search for greater connectivity with Southeast Asia is driving the evolution of the relationship between India and Myanmar. A partnership with Naypyidaw could help India’s integration with the more dynamic economies of Southeast Asia as well as with the dynamic Yunnan province in China. In doing so, India also expects to contain China’s influence in Myanmar. Transport infrastructure projects, including the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project, are being developed in Myanmar that may help India achieve its objectives. But numerous obstacles including ethnic conflicts in the country as well as relative mistrust between New Delhi and Naypyidaw may inhibit regional integration through Myanmar. India moreover faces competition from countries with much larger capacities such as Japan and the United States, which on one hand may help diminish China’s influence but also diminish the political space available for India.